Running / Hiking / Climbing at the Lost Dutchman

Last Wednesday, while Pharmie and I were visiting my grandparents in Arizona, we stole their van for the day and drove to the Lost Dutchman State Park. We wanted to climb as far up the Superstition Mountains as we could.

We packed a backpack with a lot of water, food, some band-aids, and sunscreen. We started by lathering up once we got to the park:

The start of the trails.


Me with a cacti.


Starting to head up.

As we got farther along, the trail got rougher...

...and rougher...


...and rougher...


...and rougher...


...and rougher.

There were 2 giant boulders just off the trail that were just barely not touching. I crawled under one:

Close up.


Looking up the “trail.”

We came to a narrow little ledge that we had to climb along:

Pharmie’s afraid of heights, so she hugged the wall pretty tight (and put on her “scared face”):

We came to a steep clearing of some smooth rock. At this point, we had climbed about 1,500 feet. In the middle of this photo, off in the VERY distance, you can see the top of the Flatiron:

Tiny waterfall and pool.

At that point, it got steep. As in STEEP steep. The trail was labeled as “difficult,” but we didn’t really know what that meant. Afterwards, we learned that it meant the trail wasn’t maintained after the point where we stood, and it went from “hiking” to “full-fledged mountain climbing.” Here’s Pharmie climbing up, and in the distance you can see the narrow ledge we traversed 20 minutes before:

Climbing up...


...and up some more.

We got to the top of the next peak, and Pharmie called it quits. She wasn’t sure she could go any farther up and then get back down. So I didn’t want to be stuck farther up the mountain with someone having a panic attack. We had a great climb, so we snapped a few photos before heading down. Here’s me at the top:

Us at the top


Looking down the way we came (see the tiny homes 2,200 feet below off in the distance?)


Looking up to the top of the Flatiron (to the right)

So going up is the easy part. Climbing down is tricky. Pharmie was sore for a few days because she had to “crab walk” her way down some of the mountain:

Spider-woman-Pharmie

We stopped back at those 2 huge boulders:

And of COURSE I had to get a picture of “Steve in a Speedo” in his Speedo as we climbed down:

Gross.

We made it up the mountain in 1:30, but it took us 2:00 to get back down. But we finally made it back to flat earth:

We ran back to the van and dropped off the backpack. Then we hit the trails for a little run. We took a trail that kept us out of the mountains, running just below them:

I was getting SWEATY!


Above “Green Boulder”


Running down


You can see Green Boulder, the rocks that we were above 2 photos up, behind us


Final stretch back towards the van

All in all, we were out there for about 5 hours. What a GREAT day in Arizona!! I wanna go back!!